Referring to a study documenting 17,000 deaths in six countries from the use of the drug used against malaria in the spring of 2020, the expert particularly lashed out at political decision-makers who advocated using it to neutralize the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, when

‘Promoting hydroxychloroquine with its potential dangers was irresponsible and unworthy of our political personalities,’ the head of the Pharmacology Department of the Bordeaux University Hospital stressed on Franceinfo.

Molimard said that since March 2020, when Covid-19 broke out in France, he had been warning about the ineffectiveness of this product to treat it and the risk it represented.

However, we were not listened to, despite the scenario that favored the toxicity of hydroxychloroquine, he said, referring to the research published in the medical journal Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy.

Molimard strongly criticized the University Hospital Institute of Marseille, headed by Professor Didier Raoult, perhaps the best-known promoter in France of the controversial drug against Covid-19, a center that continued to prescribe it until December 2021, ‘without the authorization of the necessary clinical trials’.

For the pharmacologist, the 17,000 fatalities reflected in the study are just a base figure, which could escalate to 100,000 worldwide if cases from countries with high lethality rates due to the pandemic, such as India and Brazil, are taken into account.

At the height of Covid-19, perhaps no politician did more for the use of hydroxychloroquine than then U.S. President Donald Trump (2017-2021), to the point of going so far as to claim that he consumed it.

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